In the United States, it’s coming up on the celebration of Mothers Day on the second Sunday in May. Depending on the personalities and circumstance of mother, daughter, granddaughter, son, father grandfather, there are songs in just about every tradition and genre that would suit. On the Native American side, for example, the group Black Lodge has recorded a song called simply Mother, and there’s a fine collection of lullabies from many tribes called Under the Green Corn Moon. Taking another direction, Afro Celt Sound System takes in Arabic and African elements into its song for mothers. Susan McKeown blends Native American and ancient mythological ideas in her song Ancient Mother, and Robin Spielberg offers an instrumental take on the joys of motherhood on Mothers Celebration.

Two songs from the Irish tradition which work well when you are thinking of Mothers Day:

Peata Beag do Mhathar is a lively song with a beat that invites a mother to be dancing her child around with. Even if you’re not sure of the Irish words, with have to do with jokes, tricks,a nd loves for your child, the welcome and fun of the song come through clearly. In this recording by Cathie Ryan, it’s also paired with a another fine tune which will keep you dancing, Joseph’s Reel by John McCusker.

On a different album, Ryan has recorded A Mhaithrin, A’Leigfea ‘Un An Aonaigh Me? which in English is Mother, Will You Let Me Go to the Fair? She sings the words in both Irish and English on this one, so you can follow the story in two languages. It is a story parents and children will easily recognize: the child reeeally wants to go to that fair, and the mother is saying no, you can’t go. It has a joyful tune which adds to the fun of the piece, and clearly Ryan had a fine time with the recording of it, as well.

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Travel has changed me so much.

Short trips, long trips, it doesn’t matter how long I’m gone or where I go: I inevitably come back a different person, with new perspectives and different points of reference I apply, knowingly or not, to my everyday life. The change is rarely what I anticipated; the changes shape me in ways I’m not aware of.

When we go to places both new and familiar with open eyes and clear minds, the things we can learn in short periods of time are astonishing. Last year, when my fiance and I traveled around Sri Lanka and South Africa, with a few-day stopover in the Maldives in between. I went there knowing little about the places we’d visit beyond basic facts and broadstrokes of their respective histories. Five weeks later, those countries felt familiar: the mood of the people, the vibe of the politics, the tourism highlights and lowlights, how to get around, where to go, what to expect, what to see and what to skip. Broadstrokes, still, but ones that at least now came together with some clarity.

But it went far beyond that, as it always does.

I learned more about myself, about my fiance, about how we see the world together and how we choose to tackle it together. She’s my only travel partner, as she’s my only partner in life: we’ve been all over the world these past 7 years, but still, we surprise, delight, maybe even sometimes disappoint each other in ways we didn’t expect. That trip was no different, as the one before it wasn’t and the one after it wasn’t. We learn about all the places we go to together, but maybe just as importantly, we learn more about each other together. On the fly, in situations both swish and shitty. Travel is the enabler, our ticket to world- and self-discovery. (Let’s be clear, I’m the one who might disappoint on occasion–she’s the unflappable one.)

When I come home, I do so with renewed energy and outlook; oftentimes, I come back more humble and more aware of my good fortune than I already was. I come home promising myself to hold onto that spark found on the road for as long as possible, but while memories last, and the ways I’ve changed and the things I’ve learned become an unspoken part of me, everyday life has a life of its own, immediate wants and needs, and inevitably, the thrill of travel adventures wane. I suppose this is why I sometimes find myself fighting off bouts of mild depression during those rare times when there’s no “next trip” booked.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my life, and how easily years can slip by. Events and snapshots from years past seem like yesterday: a family road trip to Montana, my first day of first grade and trying so hard to color in between the lines, the first touchdown I scored playing high-school football, my little brother (now 22) being born, my first kiss, my first time abroad.

I turned 33 years old a few weeks ago. Still young, but a well-established adult. Teenagers would say I’m old, just like I did when I was that age. They’re right: I’m old enough to have a family (when my parents were my age, I was 13!), retirement savings, a real job… a college loan that’s actually going to be paid off soon! I’m okay with it, all of it. I’m healthy, lucky to have the means to see the world, and even luckier to do it with someone I love and who shares, and inspires, my curiosity.

Travel teaches me to look at my life in new ways and in different contexts. It reminds me to appreciate the opportunities I have and the people that I know. It inspires me to be a better, more-open person. Isn’t that what travel is all about?

Eating well these days means choosing foods that are good for you, and good for the planet. That is true when you choose foods you prepare yourself, and when you eat out. Here are four restaurants in the Washington DC area which take varied approaches to the issue of sustainability in their work:

Mixt Greens is at first what you might expect from a healthy food restaurant: salads and sandwiches, lots of fresh foods. All true, but the tables you eat on and the chairs you sit on have been made from recycled materials, and the ingredients in your meals have most often been sourced locally, as growing seasons allow. You might go for the Cowboy, a salad with romaine hearts, grilled chicken, roasted red peppers, black beans, sharp cheddar, and red onion, or the farmer sandwich, which includes cheese, grilled zucchini, roasted peppers, and roasted mushrooms, or choose to build your own creation from a list of more than three dozen ingredients. For the DC area, the prices are fairly sustainable, too, with most items topping out at less than ten dollars.

To dine at Bourbon Steak, however, you’ll need to have more than few bills in your pocket. On the other hand, you may be seated next to some very high profile movers and shakers, and even if that’s not the case, the vegetables and herbs which are part of your meal (and sometimes, your drinks) will come from the restaurant’s organic garden, where pepper spray is the method used to deter pests, and where a variety of herbs and vegetables are grown. The original stock for most of these came from Amish farms in Pennsylvania.

You would not immediately think of a pub as a place for finding sustainably sourced food, but that is just what Againn offers. Both its pub grub and its regular lunch and dinner menus are prepared by chefs committed to using regionally sourced ingredients where possible, and spending time meeting the farmers when they can. So your burger may be made up of beef raised in nearby Virginia, and your trout caught in Maryland waters.

Speaking of waters…fishing ways that respect the renewable and sometimes fragile nature of the oceans and their denizens are taken into account in the food on offer at The Tackle Box. You’ll find a range of fresh seafood on the menu, as well as a note advising that availability may change with sustainability concerns, so if you’ve a certain sort of seafood in mind, call ahead and the staff will advise. The Tackle Box is a fairly relaxed and informal place with prices in line with that. If you’re looking for more upscale seafood dining, check out its sister restaurant, Hook, which follows the same principles of respect for the oceans.

There are other restaurants in the DC area which take healthy and sustainable eating into account when sourcing and preparing their foods and designing their bills of fare. Founding Farmers, for example, is owned by a co-op of farmers, and Restaurant Nora was the district’s first restaurant to be certified organic. What’s going on with sustainable food in your neighborhood?

No matter how lightly you pack for a trip, there’s one item neither you, nor I, nor anyone who has ever set forth on a journey leaves home without: expectations.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that people tend to experience the same things on their travels that they do in their day-to-day lives. If they usually find the world interesting, they find interesting things wherever they go. If nothing ever quite lives up to expectations at home, disappointment is their contrail.

Psychologists call this “confirmation bias”, a mental error we’re all subject to, to a certain extent. It’s just more comfy to maintain our own worldview, and disregard evidence to the contrary. But like all comforts, this sometimes comes at great cost.

The history of travel is replete with stories of confirmation bias, but it seems to me that no one was more afflicted than Christopher Columbus. His Spanish title was Admiral of the Ocean Sea, but I think of Columbus as the traveler most blinkered by his own expectations in the history of the world.

Every school child knows that Columbus “discovered the New World in 1492”*, and that it was an accident since he was really trying to find an eastward sea route to the spice-laden Indies. When he set off on his first voyage in 1492, he brought along an Asian interpreter, because he thought he was going to first make landfall in an island chain called Cipango off of the mainland of Cathay—that is to say, he was aiming for Japan, off of China. He estimated that the distance from the Canary Island to Cipango was just 2,400 nautical miles.**

We also know that he was convinced he’d succeeded, which is why we have all these misnomers in our lexicon, like “Indians” for America’s native population, and “pepper” for capsicum.

In many ways, it’s easy to understand why Columbus thought the way he did: after all, no one he knew or had ever heard of had been to the places he dropped anchor. And it also makes sense that in order to effectively sell his royal patrons on his trip, he had to be more than persuaded himself by the idea that the Atlantic Ocean was much narrower than was popularly supposed, and also that Asia was of such a north-south length that any decent mariner traveling West from Europe could not help but bump right into it.

But what is less well known, and also harder to understand, is how long he clung to his belief that he’d found Asia for his entire life, in spite of very strong evidence to the contrary.  Indeed, his strong belief that he’d reached Asia— which I think we can now safely call a delusion— stopped him from actually finding a sea route to Asia.

[--]

We all believe our own bullshit to a certain extent, but there’s no historical indication that Columbus lost faith in this belief even as things quickly went hinky. The first journey took longer than he expected, of course, given his underestimate of the distant. He quickly started lying to his crew, low-balling the distance that they’d traveled. (This in order to forestall a mutinous demand to turn home.) When the islands of Japan failed to materialize even by his privately revised estimations, he decided they’d somehow missed Cipango and were nearing the coast of Cathay. When they did find land nothing matched up to previous reports of Asia, he discounted it. When he managed to communicate with the Taino people he encountered (and with no help from his Asian interpreter, obviously) he decided that the island they referred to as Colba (that’d be Cuba), was Cipango. When he got there and it turned out that Cuba was not Japan, he moved on.

On his second voyage to these waters, he became convinced that Cuba was actually the mainland of China, since no one had ever heard of an island with a coast as long as Cuba’s. At that stage, though, shallow waters made the trip vexing, and so rather than continuing onward he sent his secretary to take depositions from the crew “declaring that Cuba was the Asian continent; any man who later might gainsay his declaration would receive a hefty fine and have his tongue cut out.”***

And so it went, on and on and on, throughout Columbus’ four voyages to the Caribbean, Central and South America. In fact, when he came across the landmass that would prove to be South America, he was so entrenched in his own beliefs that he didn’t recognize the ample evidence of a continent versus a small island (the size of rivers for one thing). And when he was anchored in a lagoon in Panama, and learned about a great body of water that was not far from his location, he ignored it—he was in the Malay Peninsula as far as he was concerned.

And so thanks to his unshaken faith in his own beliefs and his stubborn adherence to his expectations, Columbus missed out on being the first European to discover the great body of water known as the Pacific Ocean, which is to say, the actual sea route to the Indies, his entire life’s mission. This fact was left to be revealed to the European world by another explorer who would eventually lend his name to the continent— a Columbus contemporary, Amerigo Vespucci.

_{*Please read the quotation marks sarcastically: Columbus wasn’t the first European to discover these lands, and the land was hardly new to its millions of inhabitants. I’ve been studying the history of the spice route and find little to recommend any of its heroes as human beings—Columbus is no exception.}

_{**I’m not sure how long the distance actually is, but flying east from the Canaries to Japan is more than 6,000 nautical miles, so Columbus’ estimate was a major understatement.}

_{***Columbus in the Americas, by William Least Heat-Moon, a slim but very valuable volume on this subject.}

There’s so much to see and do in New Zealand that narrowing it down to just one thing would be impossible. But if you choose travelling the length of New Zealand from north to south on State Highway 1 as your one thing, that would definitely be something to write home about.

That’s exactly what ex-pat Bob Moore did. In his desire to learn more about his adopted country, he hopped in a car and drove State Highway 1 from tip of the north island to the bottom of the south. And at each stop along the way, he looked for the one thing that made that town stand out from all the others along SH1. It might be the local pub or niche museum. Or even a world famous public toilet. Whatever it was, Bob was determined to find out what it‘s ‘1 thing‘ was, much to the entertainment of the locals, many of whom must have shaken their heads wondering who this mad Englishman was.

You can read all about his adventures in his book The 1 Thing (A small epic journey down New Zealand’s mother road).  This highly entertaining and enlightening journey through New Zealand‘s heartlands reads like a series of postcards from a quirky travel friend. Bob’s uninhibited thoughts and conversations with locals meet along the way are interspersed with historic facts and entertaining attempts to transliterate town names.

The 1 Thing is a must read for anyone who’s contemplating, or even just dreaming of a road trip through New Zealand.